Relation between ISO, Virtual machines, VMware, VMX file and VMDK file

Question

Can someone assist me in relating ISO, Virtual machines, VMware, VMX file and VMDK file together?

I need to understand how all these components relate together. Is there any diagram or chart that shows the linkage among these components.

Answer 1

ISO = Usually an Image of a CD or DVD which you can burn, resulting in a duplicate of the original

Virtual machines = Guest operating systems within a VMware Host server

VMware = The manufacturer of the leading virtualization software.

VMX = the configuration file for a virtual machine

VMDK = The actual virtual disk, or contents of the virtual machine.

Answer 2

A late post, but...

First, an ISO file is basically a 'virtual CD/DVD'... which may be mounted in a virtual machine. So there is a direct correlation... analogous even...with the other entities. BjoernD may have a point. ;)

As for a Chart...

Computers

Actual | Virtual (simulated in software)
-------|---------------------------------
  Dell |  "Windows Virtual PC"
  HP   |  "VirtualBox"
  etc  |  "VMware"
       |    VMware program creates/loads...
       |     VMware Virtual machine = 
                myPC.VMX (configuration file)
                      + 
                myPC.VMDK (virtual computer system in a file)
                            + (optional) myCD-DVD.ISO file

                  ...where myCD-DVD.ISO is a 'virtual' CD/DVD drive.
                   It is a 'mounted' ISO file (image of CD/DVD disk)

The VMware software lets you run a 'virtual' version of a computer... fullscreen or in a window...on another computer.

Answer 3

It would be hard to put everything together into a diagram because as the commenters already indicated these are very different things at very different levels of abstraction. I'll try to find a relation anyway:

You can imagine a virtual machine being a real computer (== physical machine) simulated in software. Wikipedia From 10,000 ft a VM is a program that emulates hardware and thereby allows you to do anything you could do with a normal computer, eg, install an operating system.

There are many implementations of virtual machines (with varying performance and feature sets), for instance Microsoft's Hyper-V , Qemu , Virtualbox . VMware is a company that specializes in providing a range of virtual machine implementations as well as many products related to their VMs. In your case VMware probably refers to one of their desktop products such as VMware Player or VMware Workstation .

When you set up a virtual machine in one of these solutions, they provide you means of configuring your virtual computer. Imagine this similar to buying the single parts of a PC in the shop: you need a network card, some processors, memory, hard disks, ... and then you put it all together. This configuration needs to be stored somewhere and in the case of VMWare's desktop products this is what gets stored in a VMX file .

Sometimes you want to have access to a CD-ROM in your virtual machine. You may get this buy passing your physical computer's CD drive to the VM directly. Most of the time however, you will instead pass a CD-ROM image from your physical PC's hard drive. A common format for such CD images is the ISO format . Most VM implementations allow you to simply add such a file to your virtual machine and make it look as if it was a real CD in a real drive.

One of the cool use cases of virtual machines is that you can preconfigure a custom operating system along with a bunch of applications. Then you can take a 'snapshot' of this computer and pass it around to your friends. They can then boot this snapshot in their VM and directly work with all the cool apps you installed without having to go through the tedious steps of installing and configuring the whole system. Such a 'snapshot' is called a virtual appliance . In the case of VMware these appliances are stored in VMDK files .